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We report on an empirical study where we cut off email usage for five workdays for 13 information workers in an organization. We employed both quantitative measures such as computer log data and ethnographic methods to compare a baseline condition (normal email usage) with our experimental manipulation (email cutoff). Our results show that without email, people multitasked less and had a longer task focus, as measured by a lower frequency of shifting between windows and a longer duration of time spent
working in each computer window. Further, we directly measured stress using wearable heart rate monitors and found that stress, as measured by heart rate variability, was lower without email.

Without email, you'll get more done. Please forward this important information to all your friends.

I was asked recently by someone looking to possibly get into this field, “what does a normal day look like for you”? It’s a good question. I haven’t ever really thought about in before. I tell friends I sit on a computer all day and write code, but there’s a lot more to it that I just don’t think about usually. So, here’s an average day for me as front-end developer.

I’m increasingly realizing that many of my gripes about applications these days are triggered by their failure to understand my context in the way that they can and should.... In each of these cases, programmers seemingly have failed to understand that devices have senses, and that consulting those senses is the first step in making the application more intelligent. It’s as if a human, on awaking, blundered down to breakfast without opening his or her eyes!

Mobile and sensor-based programming creates new opportunities to innovate.

Quantum software has finally left the dark ages with the creation of the first practical, high-level programming language for quantum computers. Although today's devices are not ready for most practical applications, the language, called Quipper, could guide the design of these futuristic machines, as well as making them easier to program when they do arrive.

Based on Haskell, and can't run on an actual quantum computer. But... progress?

This post provides this definition and also looks closely at declarative programming as a paradigm: its benefits, its limitations, and how it impacts professional developers. We will also see how declarativeness relates to what is commonly understood as functional programming, and consider ways in which we can reach for declarativeness as a tool in our otherwise imperative code.

Independent, stateless and deterministic... and just as likely to annoy you as any other code.

"On December 9, 1968, Dr. Douglas C. Engelbart and the Augmentation Research Center (ARC) at Stanford Research Institute staged a 90-minute public multimedia demonstration at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco. It was the world debut of personal and interactive computing...." To commemorate this famous event, commonly known as the mother of all demos, SRI held a 40th anniversary celebration at Stanford today. As a small tribute to the innovative ideas that made up the demo, it is befitting to mention some of the programming languages that were used by Engelbart's team. A few were mentioned in passing in the event today, making me realize that they are not that widely known.

They dropped a little LSD (Language for Systems Development) and threw some SNOBOLs.

In the past few months I’ve had the… uh… privilege of helping some people who are new to Python to get to know the language. I found that there are some pitfalls that almost everyone meet when they’re new to the language, so I decided to share my advice with you. Each part of this series will focus on a different common mistake, describe what causes it and offer a solution.

This competition ranks lossless data compression programs by the compressed size (including the size of the decompression program) of the first 109 bytes of the XML text dump of the English version of Wikipedia on Mar. 3, 2006.... The goal of this benchmark is not to find the best overall compression program, but to encourage research in artificial intelligence and natural language processing (NLP). A fundamental problem in both NLP and text compression is modeling: the ability to distinguish between high probability strings like recognize speech and low probability strings like reckon eyes peach.... This is an open benchmark. Anyone may contribute results.

Compression improvements are eligible for the Hutter Prize, with 50,000 euros of funding.

Today I’m releasing Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Geometry. It’s a Compass and Straightedge tool/puzzle game written in JavaScript. I’ve always thought Geometric Construction felt like a puzzle, so to me this pairing was quite natural. Compass and Straight edge is a technique for constructing shapes out of circles, straight lines, and their intersection points.

I've received a couple of questions about fred following the failure of the kickstarter to fund it as open source yesterday.... The big one is: "why don't you just open-source it as-is?". My answer is: it's not that simple, and it wouldn't help anyone as-is. I am not willing to just cut this all loose to the world. It represents a non-trivial amount of work, and why would I undercut my own ability to license it appropriately? Seriously, how can you possibly justify that? It would be one thing if I was riding a train of fat paychecks from some "day job", but I'm not. This is what pays my bills, and I'm not giving it up for free.

The amount of work needed to open source a project is often non-trivial... and not free.

Microsoft has just made its mark on 3D printing with its announcement of built-in support for 3D printing in Windows 8.1. Now I don’t usually do blog posts like this where I pretend to keep up with news, but I see nothing but hollow rehashes... about this story. Heck, even Microsoft’s own blog post from a general manager is 100 percent devoid of information on what they’ve introduced. That’s a real shame, because the new Windows components advance the 3D printing field by quite a bit while fixing many of the glaring technical issues.

Is Windows 8.1 the first platform to have meaningful standards and support for 3D printing?

Something about the ailing PC industry, competition among makers of smartphones and the endless quest for the next big thing has nearly every major consumer electronics manufacturer working on a smart watch or at least contemplating it. The latest is Dell, whose global VP of personal computing just told The Guardian that the company is thinking about a smart watch despite “challenges in cost, and how to make it a really good experience.”

Everywhere you go on the web you see some sort of slider or scrolling widget on the page. You see a lot of them on blogs advertising the latest posts, you see them on event pages showing shots of the audience and speakers and you even see them on software company homepages showing screenshots of the their latest software release. Sure you can get a ton of different ones from the WordPress plugin directory, or by shopping around different widget company websites, but how hard is it to make one? In this article we will attempt to show the anatomy of these types of sliders and scrollers.

No one is happy with how quickly developers change the world, and everyone wants the code to flow like water from a fire hose, but no one wants to give developers what they need to get the job done. The same boss who wants the job finished yesterday won't hire more people, buy faster machines, or do any of the dozens of things that make it easier for programmers to just program. Here are 15 real-world roadblocks to programming progress, each of which is getting in the way of building the next generation of software.

Brew some coffee, don't change the requirements and get out of the way...

I've been tempted to take a Linux box with and AMD GCN GPU, and just go direct to the hardware since AMD has opened up a bunch of required documentation (ISA and driver source). The ultimate in graphics API is virtually no API, and no CPU work to draw anything. The engine would simply leverage the 64-bit virtual address space of the GPU, give all possible resources a unique virtual address, then for any given GPU target, pre-compile (meaning at author time) not just the shaders, but the command buffer chunks required to draw a resource in any of the render targets in the game's pipeline.

Like any developer tool vendor, we at NDepend are eating our own dogfood. In other words, we use NDepend to develop NDepend. Most of default code rules are activated in our development, and they are preventing us daily from all sorts of problems.... It is not so much about keeping the code clean for the sake of it. More often than not, a green rule that suddenly gets violated, sheds light on a non-trivial bug.

Most systems administrators are quick, perhaps too quick, to tell you “I’m not a coder.” Oddly, this admission normally comes after boasting about how many programming languages they know or have used. Why is this? Can this be changed? Here is my 5 step plan on how any SA can become an honest to goodness programmer.

Open sourcing a library is easy, it is just a matter of seconds. All you need is a public repository hosted somewhere (GitHub, Bitbucket, etc.) right? Nope! Actually, it would be better for everyone if you would add some love to your new shiny library you just made publicly available. Let's see how to do that.

A vulnerability that has existed in Android for the past four years can allow hackers to modify any legitimate and digitally signed application in order to transform it into a Trojan program that can be used to steal data or take control of the OS. Researchers from San Francisco mobile security startup firm Bluebox Security found the flaw and plan to present it in greater detail at the Black Hat USA security conference in Las Vegas later this month.

On the brighter side, it's a good counter-example of Android fragmentation.

At the center of Facebook's data center design philosophy is "disaggregation"—the breaking up of what has traditionally constituted a "server" into purpose-specific chunks of hardware interconnected largely by network hardware. It's ironic, in a way, that this is happening on the old Sun campus. In its heyday, Sun advertised with the slogan "The network is the computer." Now, the computer is the network both conceptually and physically.

Open compute efforts from Facebook and Rackspace demonstrate a DIY path for building datacenters.

Doug Engelbart died today. His work has always been very difficult for writers to interpret and explain. Technology writers, in particular, tend to miss the point miserably, because they see everything as a technology problem. Engelbart devoted his life to a human problem, with technology falling out as part of a solution. When I read tech writers' interviews with Engelbart, I imagine these writers interviewing George Orwell, asking in-depth probing questions about his typewriter.

Sixty-five years ago... the Manchester Small Scale Experimental Machine — nicknamed “Baby” — became the earliest computer in the world to run a program electronically stored in its memory. This was a flagship moment: the first implementation of the stored program concept that underpins modern computing.

An anniversary we missed: early RAM running the first stored "software".

It's a common need in web apps: you click something and the text of the thing you just clicked changes. Perhaps something simple like a "Show" button that swaps to "Hide", or "Expand Description" to "Collapse Description." This is a fairly simple thing to do, but there are various considerations to make. Let's cover a bunch of ways.

What other ways can you swap items using just HTML, CSS and JavaScript?

I used the following in a lecture called “Why you should never write your own database”. It has never been run, tested, or anything, but it serves as a good way to discuss the challenges involved in building real world databases.... a fully functional, scale out capable, sharding enabled No SQL Key/Value store in less than 60 lines of code.

Hipster coding logic: NoSQL is always smaller, because we leave out the SQL.